Inspiration
iClickers are fairly expensive, often glitchy, and cumbersome to use. They also only offer a way for teachers to poll using multiple choice questions. The functionality for "short answer" questions just does not exist in a usable state. We want to create a version that's free, easy to use, and provides teachers the ability to really test students' knowledge of what they are learning.
What it does
It has the standard functionality of providing teachers a way to create polls and allow students to join their classroom. This functionality simply replaces clickers by testing students on multiple choice questions. The app also allows for teachers to pose short-answer questions to their students and grade them quickly by using Google's natural language processing to generate a condensed view of what the student is really talking about in their response. Rather than simply checking if the student just inputs a couple of keywords, the app reads into what the student is saying and evaluates whether they're actually talking about the subject at hand, allowing the teacher to better understand where students are struggling and test students on their real knowledge on the subject.
How we built it
We built a mobile app in Android Studio which has a UI for teachers and students, allowing teachers to create polls and students to join polls. Then, the app communicates with Google Firebase to allow teachers to send the poll to the students and for the students to send their answers back to the teacher (but in a condensed form).
Challenges we ran into
This was our first time dealing with Google Cloud and one of us had never touched Android programming before. We had to learn these things from scratch and that ate into our time. Because of this, we struggled with allowing different activities to be triggered upon data entry or button presses. Also, adding functionality to continuously add new questions, allowing for teachers to create polls of arbitrary length, proved to be fairly difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First, creating an app that even runs in the first place is something I (Henry) am pretty proud of. Also, we have recreated a service that costs students huge amounts of money in less than 24 hours (albeit to late to save ourselves from having clickers) and we hope to be able to save students lots of money over the years, lowering the cost of a college education, even if it's only the cost of a clicker.
What we learned
Keep your code super clear in Android. It can get messy really quickly. Android buttons are really complex and should not be underestimated. It might be prudent to do a time-limited project using an environment that you really understand.
What's next for Answr
Ensure feature completion, bug fixing, improving UI for creating polls, add functionality to import a poll from a file, iOS, Canvas Integration, data analytics. We also hope to potentially have a professor try out our completed app and test implementation in the real world, and gain user feedback.
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